It’s the fucking cable

Buying cables from Monoprice has always been a no-brainer for me and they have all have worked pretty much flawlessly. So naturally when we wanted to try using SDI (with our Canon XF105) I ordered some BNC terminated cables off of Monoprice (back in Jan 2013) which I assume would work for HD-SDI (seems like a common assumption if you read the reviews) but we never could get it to work.

Come a year later, we get a Matrox VS4 which automatically selects the resolution and frame rate and we revisited SDI and happen to discover that it worked when we tried sending an SD signal. After that discovery I started digging into it deeper and there is a nice specification for SDI cables called SMPTE and we needed an SMPTE 292M compliant cable. Searching online for these kind of cables I found one from B&H. I quickly ordered a few of them and I was super excited and relieved when they worked flawlessly on the first try. They are definitely worth the price. The cables arrived the day before our AGM and were extremely useful because the tech area was about 70 feet from our camera and 120 feet from the presenter TV at the stage. So we were nice and out of the way instead of having to move into the range of HDMI.